Is This a Poem?

By Richard Price

This is a book which regards poetry as a meeting point
and creator of overlapping communities of writers,
readers, and audiences. While essays here look closely
at individual poets in the lyric tradition, including
Edward Thomas, Denise Riley, and Edwin Morgan,
the author also elucidates the networks of energy and

• Language: English
• Publisher: Molecular Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9782970037668

Richard Price

Richard Price is the author of several novels, including Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He won a 2007 Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series The Wire.

Book preview

Also by Richard Price

Poetry

Sense and a Minor Fever

Perfume & Petrol Fumes

Lucky Day

Rays

Small World

Moon for Sale

Artist’s Books

Gift Horse (with Ronald King)

The Mechanical Word (with Karen Bleitz)

Folded (with Julie Johnstone)

Wake Up and Sleep (with Caroline Isgar)

Little But Often (with Ronald King)

Fiction

The Island (Two Ravens Press)

Non-fiction

British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000 (with David Miller)

The Star You Steer By: Basil Bunting and British Modernism

(editor, with James McGonigal)

Is This a Poem?

Richard Price

Molecular Press

Copyright © 2016 by Richard Price. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

ISBN 978-2-9700376-1-3

ISBN 978-2-9700376-6-8 (e-book)

The author wishes to thank all those who originally commissioned or accepted the pieces gathered here, plus Gerry Cambridge www.gerrycambridge.com for the cover design and Ian Neil for copy-editing. ‘The Wasp Trap: Edward Thomas, William Carlos Williams, Philip Larkin, and Denise Riley’ was a keynote lecture given at the Expanded Lyric Conference 2014 at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Modern Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast. ‘War Damage: Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Guillaume Apollinaire, David Bomberg’ was a keynote lecture given at the British Comparative Literature Association’s International Conference 2010 and later published in Comparative Criticism. ‘His Care for Living English’ first appeared in Ford Madox Ford, Modernist Magazines and Editing (International Ford Madox Ford Studies 9), 2010; this version of ‘CAT-Scanning the Little Magazine’ first appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, ed. Peter Robinson, 2013; ‘Sylvia Pankhurst and Germinal’ was presented at Modernism, Cultural Exchange and Transnationality: 2nd conference of the AHRC Modernist Magazines Project, 2009. ‘Migrant the Magnificent’ and ‘Beyond La Grille: France and Four Contemporary Poets: David Kinloch, Peter McCarey, Donny O’Rourke, and Iain Bamforth’ were first published in PN Review. ‘Some Questions about Literary Infrastructure in the 1960s’ was published in The Scottish Sixties: Reading, Rebellion, Revolution?, eds. Bell and Gunn, 2013. ‘Generosity’ was first published in Poetry Review. ‘Edwin Morgan: Is this a Poem?’ was first published in The Scottish Literary Review, while ‘Margaret Tait: Film-maker and Poet’ was published in Painted, spoken. ‘Ear-Jewels Catch a Glint: Roy Fisher’s Half-year Letters’ was published in An unofficial Roy Fisher, ed. Robinson, 2010. ‘Robin Fulton: Light Years’ first appeared in Poetry International; ‘Arc Editions: the artists Karen Bleitz, Victoria Bean, and Sam Winston’ was published in Artist’s Book Year Book 2008-9, ed. Bodman, 2007. Vennel Press: the autobiography of a poetry press appears on the website hydrohotel.net

Contents

FOREWORD

MODERN LYRIC

The Wasp Trap

War Damage

His Care for Living English: Ford Madox Ford

MAKING

CAT-Scanning the Little Magazine

Sylvia Pankhurst and Germinal

Migrant the Magnificent

Literary Infrastructure in the 1960s

Poetry Pamphlets as Public Private Spaces

Vennel Press: The Autobiography of a Poetry Press

Arc Editions

POETS, ARTISTS, LYRICISTS

Generosity

Edwin Morgan: Is This a Poem?

Margaret Tait: Film-Maker and Poet

Ear-Jewels Catch a Glint: The Half-Year Letters

Beyond La Grille: France and Four Contemporary Poets

Robin Fulton-MacPherson: Light Years

AFTERWORD

INDEX

Foreword

When you open a book on poetry that ranges from the First World War to the millennium, there are names you expect to see and traditions you don’t. ‘Edward Thomas’ might bring in the Hardy–Frost–Thomas phalanx of approachable verse, and the suspicion of a reactionary move to steal the ball from the high-modernist owners of 20th century English poetry. Ez & Tom, indeed, are out; in this book, Bunting considers Ford more as a craftsman and mentor than as an experimenter, and even high modernists who were never really welcome in the club — Hugh MacDiarmid and David Jones — are not invoked where they might have been expected: Jones among the First World War bards and artists with ‘In Parenthesis’; and MacDiarmid as one who dazzled others discussed in this book, rather than as the old stick-in-the-mud we see here. The reason for this might be the importance Richard Price attaches to tradition in the sense of making and giving — something where generosity is valued higher than all-encompassing ambition (which is not to say that ambition is absent).

This book shows how a range of artists has made things for themselves and for their friends, and how those processes create diffuse communities. It is the processes rather than the people that do this: most of the people studied here were not acquainted with the others — the exceptions being Gael Turnbull, who knew William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Roy Fisher and Edwin Morgan; Morgan who knew Hamilton Finlay and the gaggle of Informationists; and Price himself.

I’d highlight two aspects of these traditions. When we turn to how the procedures of art bring artists into community, we might think of Turnbull, Migrant and its ramifications. When art is live, when you see it being made, you can feel there’s something unique or perhaps unrepeatable about it. It’s part of the changing world, not an item on the shelf. That is what Richard Price works to recover in these pieces on a unique constellation of artists.

On Montale’s poems to his late wife, which linger on trivial keepsakes, Price notes, ‘What the gift, what generosity is, shifts and almost evades us: presents always end up conventionally useless, they become, ideally, tags to the real gifts, the memories to which they, and we, have become so attached’. We’re not talking about products to shift at market, but about the intangibles that link us, so frailly, to the real.

This mirror-ball of a book casts some light also on the poetry of Richard Price himself — how it reaches out, through artists’ books, through the production and distribution of small magazines and publications, through lyrics set to music and through some of the improvisational readings he has performed of his own work, to whoever will take to this poetry which, while steadfastly rejecting the high-modernist career path, goes to work on all the major events in our small lives.

PMcC

Modern Lyric

The Wasp Trap

The word ‘lyric’ faces two ways, one looking back to kinds of poetry written to be sung or at least intoned to the sound of a musical instrument. The instrument in question is that ancient contraption, the lyre. When we talk of lyric poetry there is, I believe, the authority of that appeal to the time-honoured. Some poets and some readers may well like to be associated with that authority, but there is also a kind of old-fashioned flavour to it, a Christmas pudding stolidity to the term: lyric poetry is traditional, yes, and the tradition probably has to be observed in some sort of over-indulgent feast now and again, but, if the tradition can’t modernise itself, let us hope this sort of Christmas does not go on for too long.

Lyric poetry is delivered through the first person, the ‘I’, and, in the same way that no poetry simply transacts information or — unlike journalism for instance — pretends to, it is as much about the lateral and contextual as about the declared subject. The self itself is a key subject for lyric poetry, which often deals with attempts to organise feelings that are so strong or so aberrant that they challenge such organisation; or else, the lyric poem is a stylisation of feelings which in their natural state would never actually appear so distorted. Although the apparent autobiographical can be one source of the lyric poem’s concentrated emotional energy, it can also be the source of its aesthetic inertia.

Although every self-respecting reader knows that the ‘I’ in any poem cannot be the I of the actual poet — selectivity, language itself, never mind its particular rules in poetry, could not possibly allow that — still, lyric poetry asserts emotional realism and personal reaction, with the person doing the reacting being the minimally constructed person of the poet. Even within the ‘me, me, me’ faction of lyric poetry, confessional poetry, the poet appears as a literary character — when the poem becomes aural, he/she appears as a character in a version of drama. Not to spoil certain kinds of reading and listening pleasure — and psychological succour, since, in vulgar contradiction to ‘art for art’s sake’, I do believe that poetry is a therapeutic force founded in kinds of empathy and kinds of witness, even that of pattern recognition — the writer may not want to make too much of this fictiveness, may not want to suggest that the central perceiving energy at the heart of the form is hardly central, barely perceives, and has derived pretty much all the apparently unitary realistic energy of the poem from a host of different and artificial pre-sets.

Lyric poets may feel it is bad enough being caught in a struggling, stalling art form — poetry itself — one that is regarded with indiscriminate ill favour as distant and academic – without deliberately encouraging those views. Post-modern depersonalisation in poetry is not for everyone, even if everyone must depersonalise themselves to some degree to have a personality. And the lyric poet’s lot can be a particularly uncomfortable one because if poetry isn’t being criticised for being too knowing, too intellectual, it’s being criticised for being too personal, too simple, a little-mediated outpouring of selfish emotions.

When the word lyric stands on its own, though, without the suety clog of the word ‘poetry’, it becomes a much lighter thing altogether — the words of a song are quite clearly in the air ‘now’, and, unlike lyric poetry, ‘now’, the contemporary, seems to be a key construction material. Even though song is so often concerned with the singer as ‘I’, the singer is not held down by the personal nature of the song and listeners seem better able to hold the contradiction in place — that they are listening to an intense affecting lyric, often with extraordinarily sophisticated musical production, that touches and amplifies emotional reality with a stylisation that is wildly artificial but somehow ‘true’. Or at least true for that extraordinary trance state of listening absorption, as powerful as it is fleeting.

When lyrics are written down they seem more fragile, more transient than their vocalisations. The physical manifestation of the lyric sheet — crammed into eight-point or less on a CD-case or, more likely in this download age, supplied by one of those online behemoths that seem to supply every lyric to every song in the instant of a tippety-tap in a search engine: they are there but for the grace, virtually, as the song is virtual in the disturbance of air any melody makes. And with song of course, why should anyone look up a text? Instead we live with misheard lyrics, with fragments of songs, we live with them and we love them — often the chorus, or the bridge — in a way that we can seldom accept with poems, fixed as they are in dullard print solidity, with no hook or refrain which — though they are still pulsing with modernity and expressive power in song in poetry are seen as a throwback, like the prehistoric lungfish in C.L. Dallat’s wonderful poem on that theme¹, or a poetic version of the anatomical appendix, once useful, they say, for digesting wood. Maybe poetry would love the craft of Song to be outmoded but it would be an accusation born out of self-interest and insecurity, the secret despair that maybe poems themselves will never thrive in the way that song clearly does.

In fact, because song appears so prolific, almost all-present but somehow insubstantial, self-renewing, date-stamping so many experiences of its listeners — and it has many many followers, while poetry, like literature and even books, has comparatively few — song can almost seem too light, in the sense of trivial, anti-gravity, not only because it lacks pomposity but because it lacks the discrimination of true seriousness. At the extremes, while lyric poetry is caught in its own venerable drag, a form made to plummet, lyric at its worst cannot be caught because it seems so throwaway, like a kite made from a newspaper.

As both a lyric poet and a lyricist, my texts try to make sense of these tensions, these lacks and lifts. I’ll concentrate on lyric poetry here and below present some lyric poems that illustrate what I’ve made of these contradictions, and what others have, too. I should also say that there are forms which are neither lyric poetry nor song but which seem to draw on both but for the moment I want to offer some simple observations about lyric poetry itself through some examples.

First of all, some translations from Sappho. Here is my version of one of Sappho’s more well-known poems:

As if the equal

after Sappho

As if the equal — more than the equal — of a god is facing you,

sitting with you (she’s listening close) —

and you’re speaking sweetly

oh and her beautiful laugh –

now the heart in my chest is fluttering, I’m winging this,

and then I look, just for a second,

and that’s my voice gone –

as if –

no, the tongue is broken, there are just licks

of fire under my skin,

my eyes are blind, drumming and only drumming

fills my ears.

A chill of sweat is gripping me, shaking me,

I’m as pale as grass.

I am dead. It’s as if

I am dead.

Risk… everything.

My approach in lyric poetry, and in contemporary translation, is actually to underplay lyric poetry’s historic connection to music. Although some poems are said to have musicality, cadence does exist, and while Bunting, say, certainly deployed musical analogies for the structures of his poems, I don’t see the poem as a musical object — though I do see it as a sonic work and so one which can learn from song a little. With certain exceptions, I don’t really believe in the viability of an actual connection to music today, whatever it may have been in past. Poetry is much much more about speech than it is about music and so I concentrate on the stylisation of speech patterns when I involve myself in lyric poetry. The stylisation is important — I want to make it very clear that the lyric poem is not a colourless, objective carrier of properly considered emotional information, is not the executive summary of the final report from the ‘Royal Commission on Humane Smart-casual’. Repetitions, enjambed hesitations, syncopation, non-verbal transcription — some of which may well have been borrowed from the macrostructure of song but are as likely to have come from speech patterning — re-inscribe the lyric poem at the micro-level and become speech activations. To write in this way risks a mistaken accusation of naivety — but I will try to show the properties of the form itself shaped by the weight of its message, both an integral part of that expression and a clear marker that the reader or listener is now orienting him or herself towards a made object. ‘All must be risked’ Sappho says and here is the extreme, the superlative again in Fragment 150, ‘Sweet apple ripening’.

Sweet apple ripening

after Sappho

Sweet apple ripening, blushing, high high up –

high up the highest branch, neglected, forgotten.

No, not forgotten – none could possibly reach….

(Mountain hyacinth the shepherds trample,

blue hyacinth…)

The isolated, the superlative — the lyric poem is an emphatic form, a categorical form — all must be risked, there is only ONE apple up there and it is right at the TOP. There are more Exceptional Services to Exceptionality in lyric poetry than in the New Year’s Honours List, though with less astonishment of servility. Lyric poetry is abject, desperate — sometimes covered with a serenity of observation or even, as with Philip Larkin sometimes, a broken-hearted cynicism, but it is barely able to contain its extremes. ‘So’ is a very important word in lyric poetry. Here is Edward Thomas’s poem, ‘The Wasp Trap’, from 1915, which mutates Sappho’s tree-fruit into something much darker, much more cruelly civilised. Look again, for all the superlatives of the classic lyric poem:

The Wasp Trap

This moonlight makes

The lovely lovelier

Than ever before lakes

And meadows were.

And yet they are not,

Though this their hour is, more

Lovely than things that were not

Lovely before.

Nothing on earth,

And in the heavens no star,

For pure brightness is worth

More than that jar,

For wasps meant, now

A star — long may it swing,

From the dead apple-bough,

So glistening.

What is the wasp trap to Thomas? It’s an ugly thing by day — alone among the objects he names, Thomas tell us. It is not lovely naturally, so while moonlight enhances those objects which are already beautiful, we are talking wholesale transformation. This is because the wasp trap is in daylight simply a variation on a jar, pasted with jam on its inside walls and containing a quantity of water, then slung with a wire over a tree branch in the orchard. It is a cruel object, designed to take advantage of the sugar addiction wasps have, luring them to their prolonged deaths by drowning them in the liquid into which they inevitably slip. Thomas may or may not have known that it is also a foolish object, as although wasps may damage fruit they also consume large quantities of the aphids that are so destructive in an orchard.

All these qualities are utterly changed in the moonlight, however. Contrast this with Sappho’s orchard poem — its jump-cut to the trampled hyacinths does have the melancholic pang that closes ‘The Wasp Trap’ (the jump-cut is probably because of its fragmentary survival, although as we all know ruins are often more attractive than well-kept buildings) — but Sappho’s poem emphasises a growing, living thing in the orchard, and suggests that the orchard is still very much a going concern, a way of life. In this way her poem is about the rare vitality of the beloved, albeit contrasted with his or her fragility among men (those galumphing shepherds!); while Thomas’s poem is about something made by humans in a pastoral world that is passing — ‘the dead apple-bough’ suggests this apple tree has not been cared for for some time. It is perverse to say that it is lovelier than the stars or anything on earth — and I suppose that does mean lovelier than any human being. To me, it’s as if Thomas is downgrading a loved one and also himself and yet that is what Thomas insists. This is a temporary vision but a dark and barbed one, ambiguously seeming to be misanthropic and yet a paean to humankind’s weird sense of invention. This thrawn, awkward message is delivered in a poem that melds lyric repetitions and rhyme with a kind of philosophical tone, influenced by Hardy and an Elizabethan rhetorical turn, which so much of the lyric poetry to come appears to have found reinvigorating and has continued to adopt.

William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow poem would later develop this focus on a trade object in a different direction, pouring Japanese print primary colour into the picture:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens²

Williams cartoonises the scene with those blocks of tone (simple red barrow, simple white chickens — no nuance here, but a fantasy Persil purity which has its own attractions, its own charm, and, because of the artist’s print effect, perhaps confirms visually an oriental element that is there in the poem’s extended-haiku-like form). This is in preference to the Samuel Palmer haloising of moonlight and glisten you see in Edward Thomas, with the bittersweet weakness of trying to rhyme swing with glistening; but if anything Williams likes that sense of gloss more. Thomas finishes his poem with the wasp trap lingering in glisten and Williams breaks cover from a more objectivist style to poeticise with his idea that the wheelbarrow is ‘glazed with rain / water’ (drawing attention to a kind of artisan effort, and perhaps adding further to the idea in the poem of the far east, this time with its tradition of exquisite pottery). In both cases this is a clarifying and intensifying polish, which occurs in other stripped-down lyric poems. It’s there in the ‘petals, on a wet, black bough’ in Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (1913) and by the time of Philip Larkin’s well-known poem, ‘Water’ (1964) the look of wetness has become a gush — you have to ford a river to get to Larkin’s new church —held back only by a cool philosophical eye: water now a hypothetical religion, a witness to lyric poetry’s thirst. The lyric poem is itself a glistener. It shines and distorts, it is